


Double Blind

by Mertiya



Series: Hooked [1]
Category: Splinter Cell (Video Games)
Genre: Fishin, I blame Rastaban, M/M, Two idiots doing stupid things, What even is my life, assholes in love, this is all her fault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2015-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 12:28:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4787279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a routine mission goes awry, Grim tries to plan an extraction to rescue Sam.  Kobin disagrees vehemently on how said extraction should be carried out.  After all, no one ever accused Andriy Kobin of being sensible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Double Blind

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Devil You Know](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2769872) by [Rastaban](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rastaban/pseuds/Rastaban). 



> When I said this was all Rastaban's fault, I meant it. I have not played Splinter Cell; almost the entirety of the characterization for these two chucklefucks comes from her amazing fic The Devil You Know (which you should read, because this is a direct sequel). I don't know how this happened, but somehow the drug that is Kobin and his complete lack of ever doing anything reasonable has hooked me in, much as it appears to have hooked in Sam.

            “…a plutonium pit.”

            Grim’s voice was tight and cold, controlled as only she could be. Andriy Kobin leaned against the door to the control room, listening with half an ear for a moment longer before shrugging and heading in.  “We need a plutonium pit?” he asked.  “I can get a plutonium pit.  Just say the word.”

            Briggs and Charlie looked up from the SMI and exchanged a glance that was in no way lost on Kobin.  It was a glance that asked ‘how stable is he today?’  Which was really kind of insulting, when you thought about it. He was a perfectly reliable member of the crew.  Okay, sure, occasionally he still took substances of questionable legality, but that didn’t make him unreliable.  He’d even resisted the urge to take Paladin into a barrel roll the previous night after shaking off their pursuers, and it wasn’t as if anyone would have been hurt. Probably.

            “Uh, Kobie,” Charlie said quickly.  Too quickly.  There was definitely something going on.

            “Sam not back yet?” inquired Kobin, his eyes flicking across the room. Empty, apart from Grim, Charlie, and Briggs, and Grim had just reached across and shut off three of the screens in one fluid movement.  As if there was something she didn’t want him to see.  “Something wrong with the SMI?” he asked.  “Charlie, you should take a look at that.”

            “Kobie, Sam—didn’t come back.”  Charlie had cracked first, and the looks that Briggs and Grim shot him were simultaneously furious and relieved.  “They, uh, they had more forces than we expected.”

            Pain spiked through Kobin’s hand, and a vague portion of his mind noted it and filed it away for later investigation.  “So are you saying Sam’s dead, or are you saying he’s captured, because my response is going to be different depending.”

            “Captured,” Grim put in quietly.  Kobin locked gazes with her, decided she didn’t seem to be lying, and, with some relief, stopped mentally cataloguing the types and quantities of pills he had in his cabin and what their likely side-effects would be if someone were to swallow, say, three or four dozen at once.

            “Okay, great.  And they’re offering to trade him for a plutonium pit.  No problem.  I have a contact in Moscow—or no, wait, might be in Kharkiv now—either way, I’m pretty sure I could—”

            “Andriy. No.  We do not need a plutonium pit.”

            “Well, no, maybe we don’t _need_ one, but the people who have Sam, they sure seem to _want_ —”

            “We are not giving a group of known terrorists a _plutonium pit_ , Kobin.”

            “Why not?  What’s your brilliant fucking idea?  Leave him there?” Hadn’t had any stimulants today, had he?  Something wrong with his legs anyway.  They were walking by themselves, carrying him across the control room, jerking and stumbling and jumping at an ungainly pace. 

            “If you’d sit down and shut up, you’d realize that we’re currently attempting to plan an extraction.”

            He managed to pause and lean against the wall, but he didn’t sit, legs still dancing and twitching too much for that.  A glance down at his hands showed him there was blood there, his blood.  Pretty sure that was new.  Three parallel crescent marks, nail marks, scoring the palm.  The pain he had noted earlier was apparently the result of his fingernails.  Huh. He hadn’t known his nails were long enough to do that.  His head was buzzing loudly, too, and he took a moment to think back through the day to make sure that, no, in fact, he really hadn’t put anything illegal, controlled, or even somewhat mind-altering into his body.

            “All right,” Grim said calmly.  “Briggs, you’ll be on the ground for this one.  Will you be able to lead a team, or do you think you’ll do better solo?”

            “They’re gonna be expecting this,” Kobin broke in.  “You fucking know they are.  There’s no way you take Sam fucking Fisher and _don’t_ expect his team to come after you.  Like, fuck, man—”

            Grim fixed him with a look.  “I am aware of your feelings on the matter, Kobin, and you are too involved to be objective about this.  Now, Briggs—” She began to outline a very nice plan, the kind of plan with ‘Grim-specced’ branded all over it. Kobin let her get through about three more sentences before interrupting again.

            “’Too involved’?” he said.  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

            She stared at him across the SMI, eyes cold and challenging. “You know exactly what that’s supposed to mean, Kobin.  You are not objective because you are--”

            “Fucking him?”

            “I was going to say ‘romantically involved,’ but if you prefer…”

            “No, because, like, come on.  Are you saying you’re not fucking involved with Sam Fisher?”

            An icy look crossed her face, lips thinning.  Goddamn, but Grim was in a bad mood, or she’d have already realized what he was driving at.  His legs moved again, propelling him around the table.  “No, I don’t mean you’re fucking—” he raised his arms as her eyes narrowed even more.  “You’re not in love with him or anything, I didn’t mean that.”  Why that choice of words?  Kobin’s feelings toward Sam Fisher were a confused mess of lust, desire, and respect.  He wasn’t—he didn’t even know what it meant to be—fuck, that was not the fucking point right now.  That was just not the fucking point.  Didn’t matter, if Sam died.  Nothing did, in fact. He stabbed a finger in Grim’s general direction.  “You are involved with Sam Fisher, Grim, you are emotionally fucking compromised. And so are both of you,” jabbing fingers at Briggs and Charlie.  “Because that’s what people do when they’re a fucking team, they fucking care about one another, and like it or not, Sam Fisher is a man who commands loyalty and respect and goddamn friendship.  I don’t know why.  You probably do not know why.  But you can’t just sit there and tell me that you do not have a stake in the outcome of this mission, because you’d be lying, Grim, and you know it.”

            Their gazes locked, and Kobin noticed with some confusion that his voice had been rising, like the end of a question, not a statement.  Grim’s face softened slightly at the edges as she spoke, “Kobin, I understand what you’re saying, and, yes, of course we all care about Sam.  But you are not trained to put aside your own personal feelings when it comes to a matter of this importance.  I am very sorry, but this is not your fight.”

            “If it’s not my fucking fight, whose is it?” The demand came out as more of a miserable rhetorical question.

            Grim looked as if she were actually about to answer, but Charlie’s voice broke into the conversation.  “Got some relevant information here, Grim.”  His voice was shrill and high with tension.

            Her eyes slid away from Kobin.  “Okay, Charlie.  Report.”

            “Yeah, I think I know why Sam got caught.”  Charlie took a deep breath.  “Intercepted some communications from a local informant to CIA. This isn’t just a group of fanatics like we thought.  Seems there’s a local weapons manufacturer behind it, stirring up trouble. Maybe trying to cause a war? The informant’s not sure. Some Russian ex-mob guy who had to flee out here to the middle-of-nowhere Europe when Moscow got too hot for him. Ruslan Voronov. He’s a paranoid son-of-a-bitch—hang on, pulling his bio—paranoid as fuck.  This isn’t just a group of untrained Eastern European militants. This is a guy who cut his teeth on this shit, and he’s using these fundamentalists to further his own goals. He was probably expecting us.”

            “He’d have been disappointed if you hadn’t shown up,” Kobin corrected. “Rusya’s probably unhappy you’re not CIA.  He’s gonna fucking use this, ah Christ.  We have to get Sam out of there.”

            Grim sighed.  “Of course you know him.”

            “And he’s not Russian, he’s Ukrainian.”

            “Not according to my sources,” Charlie fired back in irritation.

            “Yeah, yeah, he didn’t always go by Voronov.  We go way back, Rusya and me.  He’s tried to kill me like three times, but he paid me a lot of money for a new identity and, hey, whatever, man.”  He was already regretting not putting a bullet in Rusya’s brain the last time he’d seen him, but how was he supposed to know that _not_ murdering someone would come back to bite him in the ass? 

            The legs were moving again, he noticed, pacing up and down the room at high speeds.  “Look, he’s gonna use Sam somehow, I don’t know how, but it won’t be good.  He’s a dramatic guy, you know?  A public execution—isn’t off the table.”  Or worse.  His voice was rising in pitch again; if it’d been Charlie, he’d have said that the man was getting upset, but he wasn’t getting upset, he was perfectly calm, even if his mind was playing a slideshow of the highlights of some of Rusya’s more thorough jobs.  He’d stopped supplying him after he found out about Radekhiv, because there were some things you just…didn’t do.  Not even…that had been another time he’d wanted to put a bullet through the guy’s skull, but it’d been way too late; Rusya was well out of his sphere of influence by then.

            He stopped at the wall, staring at the flickering display, his mind working, trying to weasel a way in that Rusya wouldn’t expect, but there wasn’t any way, his mind was twisty as a corkscrew, you could not possibly out-twist, out-think, _sidestep_ that brain, you’d have to—

            He heard Grim’s footsteps behind him before the pain and the full-body rigidity hit, though his mind was still surprisingly clear.  She’d tased him.  She’d fucking _tased_ him. Hands on his back lowered him to the floor, and Grim’s voice said, “Call medical.  He needs to be sedated.”

            _No_ , Kobin tried to say. _No, you can’t do this without me, you don’t know Rusya, you’ll lose and Sam will—_

_Sam will die._

            As medical arrived and the pinprick of the needle preceded his loss of consciousness, he experienced a wave of despair stronger than any he’d ever felt before, and spinning away into the blackness was like dying himself.

* * *

            “What are our options, Charlie?  Do we have contacts on the ground?”

            “Affirmative. CIA has an informant among Voronov’s men, but…”

            “But what?”

            “But _we_ were supposed to have an informant, too, and that intel is what got Sam in trouble in the first place.”

            “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to plan an extraction. Charlie, I want you to locate everyone down there who might have a beef with Voronov and his little troupe of wannabe fanatics.  We need something fast and stealthy.”

            “Uh, Grim.”

            “Yeah, Briggs?”

            “We have someone up here who has intel on Voronov.  Are you sure keeping Kobie sedated is the best idea?”

            “I don’t want him running off on his own.  He’s not tracking, and he could get Sam killed.”

            “He’s not stupid, Grim, and he’s got a point.  We’re just as involved in this as he is.”

            “I’m not going to keep him under for the whole thing.  I just want a plan off the ground and moving before Kobin sticks his oar in and fucks the whole thing up.”

* * *

            _Sam’s hands on his back, beneath the shirt.  He bucked up against the other man, groaning at the sensation—“ah, fuck”—before drawing his lips across Sam’s stubble.  And it was so_ good _, being able to do that. Hearing Sam’s possessive growl in his ears.  God. Sam’s hands were sliding his shirt up and off.  He tried to help while also trying to get Sam’s shirt off, too, but those turned out to be mutually incompatible goals, and he had to wait impatiently as the cloth came up over his head.  As soon as it had, he tried again, but Sam’s weight pinned him down to the cockpit chair._

_“Come on, man, let me get your clothes off,” he urged._

_Sam made a sad, disappointed kind of noise, but he leaned back and began to undo the buttons of his ridiculously crisp white shirt.  Did he starch them himself?  Did he fucking iron his shirts?  He probably did.  Kobin sent his to a Laundromat when he had the chance, but that wasn’t really—holy shit.  His train of thought went off the rails as Sam’s shirt dropped to the cockpit floor, revealing a broad, muscular chest.  The scars that twisted across it accented rather than marred it. “Jesus fuck, man, are you actually a god or something?”  No human being should be that goddamn ripped.  It wasn’t fair.  Also, he was now harder than he’d been before, if that was possible._

_Sam’s rumbling laughter reminded him that Sam could see him, too, and he was suddenly, absurdly self-conscious.   “Yeah, sorry about this,” he waved a hand in front of his chest.  “Turns out my job doesn’t require the same level of peak fitness as yours.”_

_“I just wanted to see—” Sam’s fingers fluttered gently down across his collar-bone and to his sternum.  The old bullet wound flared with tingling sensation beneath his fingers. Kobin’s eyes closed without letting his brain knowing about it first._

_“How’d you even know there was anything to see?”_

_“Because,” Sam breathed, and they were kissing again.  “I pay attention to you.”  Kobin thought distractedly that he could totally get used to this.  He had a brief moment of wondering whether he was high on something he didn’t remember taking. Was he dreaming? He didn’t want to be dreaming._

_“Fuck,” he breathed, and Sam’s hand dropped lower, slipping beneath his waistband and onto his erection.  His head snapped back against the headrest, a moan jerking its way out of his throat. “Oh, fuck, Fisher, fuck me, for god’s sake.  I can’t—I—”_

_Again that amused laugh.  He was beginning to realize Sam wasn’t laughing at him so much as just—laughing. He hadn’t realized that Sam Fisher, stoic extraordinaire, was capable of laughing out of sheer—what? Happiness?  Did he make Sam happy?  That was something to investigate more thoroughly later. Right now, there were other priorities. He reached down, desperate to undo his trousers and get them off, but Sam’s hands were already there, fumbling with his belt, and he went for Sam’s instead.  At least this worked better than it had with the shirt.  In a moment, he found himself staring at Sam Fisher’s cock._

_Half a second later, and he was leaning forward, mouth open, his hands on Sam’s back pulling him closer._

_“Kobin, wait.”_

_The haze of lust over his eyes cleared briefly, and he looked up in disappointment.  “C’mon, man, let me suck you.”_

_“Haven’t you ever heard of using protection?”  There was a moment where they locked eyes, and then Sam’s disapproving gaze dropped, and he sighed.  “Do not answer that.  I have no idea how you’ve survived this long.”_

_Kobin grinned cheekily.  “You telling me you’re not clean, Fisher?”_

_“It’s the principle of the thing.  I haven’t been tested recently.”_

_He flopped back in the pilot’s seat again.  “Well, you got a condom on you?”_

_Sam’s face was a study in frustration.  “I could go to my quarters—”_

_“You’re gonna walk through Paladin buck naked.”_

_“No, I could put my_ clothes _on, go to my quarters and—”_

_“Let me check the cockpit first.”  Sam was clearly not going to budge on this one, and Kobin very much wanted Sam’s cock inside him one way or another.  “Here, let me up.”  He stumbled to his feet, moving awkwardly, and knelt in front of the control panel.  There were a couple of spots to check.  He came up empty-handed from the first small alcove, but the second one held not only condoms, but also a small bottle.  “Ha! Jackpot!”  He held up the lubricant triumphantly, watching in amusement as Sam’s face wavered between surprise, desire, and slight disapproval. “Not even mine. Looks like your pilots are a kinky bunch, Fish.  Soooo…” Two steps took him back to where Sam was standing, and he just had to kiss him. It would have taken a much stronger man than Andriy Kobin to resist Sam Fisher and the expressions he was making._

_Sam’s lips were bruising in their intensity, and Kobin was moaning into his mouth, bucking against him, and he came up breathless to see that there was a flush building slowly across Fisher’s cheeks.  “Okay, change of plans,” he said in a rush.  “How about you just—fucking—fuck me?”_

_Sam responded by pulling him closer, hands sliding down his sides, and Kobin felt a full-body shiver go through the other man, as Sam murmured in his ear, “Yeah.  I can do that. Yeah.”_

_* * *_

_The fluorescent lights were buzzing at an insanely high pitch. It was going to drive him fucking crazy.  Maybe another drink would help, cut the high whine that seemed synonymous with the racing of his heart and the sweat standing out on his forehead.  He knew that was a stupid idea, at one level. Adding another drink just meant adding more to the depressant side of the stimulant versus depressant war going on in his bloodstream.  It might change his perceptions, but he doubted it would dull them enough unless he actually passed out.  Should’ve brought a xanax, maybe, but he needed his wits about him for the poker game._

_He stared across the table at Ruslan.  Rusya’s round face was flushed with alcohol, but his eyes were clear, glittering dangerously._

_“So then.  Ready?”_

_Kobin cracked his neck from side to side.  “Deal, Rusya.”  The game wasn’t going well.  His luck was shit tonight, and Ruslan had an uncanny ability to tell when he was bluffing. He’d considered cheating, but if the other man was this good at knowing when he was bluffing, he’d know about the cheating as well, and Kobin retained enough self-preservation to know that if Rusya caught him cheating, old friend or no, he’d have a large quantity of lead between his ears before he could say, ‘I can explain.’_

_Drumming his fingers loudly against the table, he tried to think of a plan of attack that didn’t end with him leaving significantly poorer than he’d been when he came in.  He could probably take the hit, but it was galling.  Couldn’t out-think him, not even on the coke.  Couldn’t out-bluff him.  Then what the fuck could he do?_

_Two more hands went by, and he folded both times.  Still shit.  Nothing left.  His brain felt as if it was mired in tar.  He wanted another hit of cocaine, but that wasn’t going to happen. He was gonna lose everything._

_“Want to call it a night?” Rusya’s eyes still held that dark, dangerous glitter, and he was smirking.  Kobin wanted to reach across the table and rip that smug grin off his face._

_“One more hand,” he said recklessly.  “You’ve outbet everyone else, Rusya.  C’mon.  You think I can’t do this?”_

_“Yeah, I think you can’t do it.  But I’ll let you self-destruct if that’s what you want.”_

_The cards moved dizzyingly fast through Rusya’s hands.  What the fuck was he doing?  Even if he trusted his luck, it wouldn’t matter, because Rusya would know if he had a good hand.  He might recoup a few of his losses, but not enough. He’d still come out the loser._

_The shuffling of the cards against each other made a soft, scratching noise. Couldn’t bluff. Couldn’t_ not _bluff.  What could he possibly hope to do that would—_

_The cards landed in front of him.  “You sure you want to play this hand?”_

_Something clicked.  Maybe it was the anger, maybe it was the fact that it didn’t even fucking matter, there was nothing he could possibly do to win against Rusya at this game of poker, or maybe his brain had finally hit the sweet spot of the coke high. But whatever.  Kobin wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, the ear, or any other orifice for that matter.  He was just going to play what he’d been dealt._

_He grinned and pulled the cards toward him, making a show of lifting them up and then pressing them to his chest.  “Yeah, Rusya.  I’m sure.  Let’s play one more hand.”_

* * *

            “Okay, Briggs, are you in position?”

            “ _Yeah.  On the ground, readying to perform initial sweep._ ”

            “Grim, you got a minute?”

            “Is it important?”

            “Kinda really yes.”

            “What is it, Charlie?”

            “It’s Kobin.  He’s gone.”

            “He’s _what_?”

            “Medical just paged me.  They, uh, misplaced him.”

            “Before or after sedating him?”

            “Well, technically after, but his clothes are gone.”

            “How much did they give him?”             
            “Well—”

            “Never mind.  Not enough. Briggs, keep an eye out for Kobin, he’s flown the coop.”

            “ _Roger that, Grim.  So far there hasn’t been any—oh fuck._ ”

            “Report!”

            “ _Gunfire from the front of the compound._ ”

            “Uh, Grim, I just checked our weapons locker.  I—think Kobie was there.  He took some stuff.”

            “What stuff?”

            “Well, uh, a really surprising amount of stuff.  I honestly would not have thought he could carry that much stuff.”

            “Briggs, hold position until I give the word.  Charlie, bring me a bottle of ibuprofen, stat.”

* * *

            _It wasn’t that Sam didn’t know what to do, exactly.  And it wasn’t that he hadn’t been in this kind of a position before, though it had been a while. But it was still some kind of a strange, heady trip to see Andriy Kobin, naked, hands against the wall, looking back over his shoulder pleadingly.  “C’mon, Sam, fuck me, will you?”_

_A full-body shudder went through Sam at the sound of Kobin’s voice. His cock twitched slightly, and he had to take a brief moment to steady his breathing.  Then he moved forward, carefully unscrewing the top of the bottle of lubricant and slathering it across his hand and—not without a slight shiver as the cold liquid came into contact with the condom—his erection._

_Approaching Kobin from behind, he slid one hand down over the other man’s shoulder and across his stomach, slowly, as he slid the other symmetrically down his back and breached him gently.  Kobin made a strangled noise.  “Enough with the goddamn foreplay,” he whined.  “Just fuck me already.”  His face had lost none of its characteristic slyness, but his words came out thick, the entire shapes of vowels shortened and twisted as his native accent surfaced._

_“You’re still a little—” Sam groped for the word._

_“I’ll loosen up, just put it in.  And the word you’re looking for is ‘tight’, fuck, why am_ I _giving_ you _English lessons?”_

_“I know what the word is!” Irritation surfaced through Sam’s arousal, but it only made him harder, and he was on Kobin, hands on hips to hold him steady as he drove himself inside._

_Kobin hissed and gasped, hips shuddering, and then he was speaking again, because when did he ever,_ ever _shut up?  Never, apparently.  “Fuuuuck, yes, ah, Christ, ouch—yeah—c’mon, Fish, you can fuck harder than that, goddamn soldier, goddammit—hell yes—fuck yes—Sam, anyone ever tell you you’re a goddamn miraculous fuck?”_

_Sam wasn’t sure if he wanted to fuck Kobin into silence or bring out more of the torrent of gibberish.  He leaned forward, fingers digging into Andriy’s stomach, and Kobin’s words slurred into an incomprehensible noise.  “Nnnnngh,” the other man panted, and then something that sounded like “yeahfuuuuck,” and he bucked back against Sam.  God, like this, mumbling curses, his dirty blond hair matted with sweat, the muscles standing out in his back as Sam thrust into him, he was—Sam didn’t know.  Didn’t have the words for it.  Open, broken, beautiful, vulnerable.  None of them fit, none of them described the whole of it, just jagged shards and little puzzle pieces.  Sam wanted to take that puzzle apart and fit it back together beneath his hands._

_“Right—right there,” panted Kobin.  “Fuck, Christ in heaven, yeah, there, keep—keep doing that, harder, god, Sam, please.”_

_Too much.  Sam’s hands landed on the front of Kobin’s thighs and he was lost.  The world had narrowed to Kobin’s heat around him, the taste of his sweat in his mouth, the soft jerky little sighs coming out of the other’s mouth in between the profanity.  Sam was greedy for him, for all of him, Sam’s damn amoral coke-snorting, fast-talking weapons-dealer-turned-asset._

_His mouth was on Kobin’s shoulder, tasting sweat and smoke and the faint impossible-to-describe and impossible-to-mistake scent of Paladin’s corridors, a strange cocktail of metal and leather and plastic.  When he climaxed, it was sharp and sudden and edged, a hot burst of near-pain drawn out of him with a soft grunt._

_He leaned against Kobin for a long moment, panting, as Kobin, still muttering soft curses, jerked himself off, then he pulled out carefully, tying off the condom with fingers that were only shaking very slightly.  Kobin leaned back against him, letting his head fall onto Sam’s shoulder, and rolling it to the side to plant a kiss on Sam’s jawline.  “Fuck, that was good,” he said.  “Goddamn, but you’re strong.”_

_Something about the way he said it made Sam look down.  The red marks of his nails were clearly visible, scoring deep lines across Kobin’s stomach and the tops of his thighs. “Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry.”_

_“Huh?” Andriy followed his gaze. “Ah, no, I liked it, it was good.”_

_The marks gave Sam an odd feeling in the pit of his stomach, warmth warring with sickness.  “I won’t do it again,” he said shortly._

_Kobin made a petulant face.  “Aw, c’mon, man, I said I liked it.”_

_“I do not like hurting people, Andriy.”_

_He expected that to be the end of the conversation, though the moment that Kobin’s eyebrows went up, mouth quirking downward, he wondered why he’d ever expected Andriy Kobin to leave something be.  “For someone who doesn’t like hurting people, you do it a whole fuckin’ lot.”_

_The world narrowed to sharp focus, the adrenaline drumbeat of his heart echoing in his ears.  Sam took the sudden anger and breathed with it, let it go.  “Just a job,” he said._

_“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, man,” Kobin said, standing upright. “I mean, whatever helps you sleep at night, I guess.”  He took two steps, and maybe this time he was going to let it drop—_ please, Andriy, let it drop _—and then he turned, hand on his collarbone.  “Remember this scar, Fish?  You shoved a fucking flagpole through my goddamn chest.  Seemed to enjoy it then.  Or is it only okay if the other guy_ doesn’t _want it?”_

_They stared at each other for a long moment, the words settling like stinging barbs onto Sam’s ears.  “I am not having this discussion right now,” he said calmly, after a long moment. The unnatural clarity and pureness of focus of the mission was already settling around him, but his protective cloak felt unsettled, like a shirt that didn’t quite fit.  “We can talk when I get back.”_

_Kobin seemed to be searching for more words, but in the end he shrugged minutely and started to pull on his clothes.  Sam watched him for a few moments before doing the same._

* * *

Sam’s transitions from sleep to waking were always sudden and swift, whether he was in his own bed or in a less pleasant environment.  Being chained to a chair, he thought, definitely constituted ‘less pleasant’. There was a bag over his head, so he could see nothing, but he could hear footsteps and low voices nearby, and he strained to make out the words as he ran through his recent memories.

            The mission had begun routinely enough, but had veered into unexpected territory when a room that should have held hostages held nothing but heavily-armed guards instead.  Sam had managed to extricate himself, but he had known from that moment that escape was unlikely.  Not so much because it was clear that their information was flawed, but because of the sinking feeling in his stomach.  He’d thought the subtle wrongness had disappeared when he left Kobin in his quarters, but it had returned full force as he tried to make his way out without alerting anyone.

            Sam wasn’t sure if he’d made stupid mistakes, or if it was simply that his enemies were well-prepared, but either way he remembered the gut-wrenching sensation of electricity coursing through his veins as the stun gun caught him.  They had waterboarded him, Sam thought, reviewing the memories clinically.  That had also been unpleasant.  He was somewhat surprised they had let him sleep, which suggested they had plans for him other than attempting to pump him for information. 

            Grim would have more information about the situation than he did, and he knew he could trust her judgment, which did not mean he could rely upon an extraction—although, knowing Grim, an attempted extraction was more likely than the alternative.  Sam breathed deeply. It was time to wait and listen.

            The guards were laughing and talking to one another in Russian, just at the edge of Sam’s hearing.  It was somewhat more difficult to make out what they were saying than if they’d been speaking English, but he got the gist.  Most of it was small talk about the living conditions and the weather. Sam smiled wryly. On the clock, off the clock, from Australia to Persia, people were the same.  Then he caught himself, because this was—not the way he thought during missions.  Fuck. Well, worrying about unusual thought patterns would only make them worse.  Now was not the time.

            There was a break in the conversation, a pause.  Sam strained his ears.  “Yes, sir,” he heard, and then the scrape of a heavy, metal door across concrete.  Then the noise of footsteps, and the sound of hearty laughter.  The dull scrape of metal on concrete as someone moved what was probably a folding chair.

            “So, you are the famous Samuel Fisher.”  The voice was lightly accented, but the accent itself was hard for Sam to place.  At first he thought it was Russian, but something about it sounded hauntingly, eerily familiar, and his stomach flipped slightly.  Nevertheless, he remained silent.  “You may call me Rusya.”  A big man, probably, judging from the depth of his voice. He chuckled as if he had made a joke. “I have questions for you, Samuel.”

            _Ask away,_ Sam thought. He had been interrogated before. Despite the catastrophe that was this mission, it was unlikely to achieve any better results now than it had then. Though a voice in the back of his mind cautioned him he could not be too careful.  He was in an extremely vulnerable position right now, and his team might full well be in the middle of attempting an extraction on scanty—or potentially incorrect—information.

            Before the first question, however, the muffled, distant noise of gunfire broke the silence.  “Ah, that will be your friends.  They are early.”

            _Shit_ , thought Sam. What was Grim thinking? One glance at the schematics of this place should have told her a frontal assault would likely get the entire team killed.

            He heard the sound of the door opening again, and one of the guards entered with a crackling walkie-talkie.  “Sir?”

            “Yes?” ‘Rusya’s’ voice spoke again.

            “ _Sir, there is a disturbance at the main gate._ ”

            “A diversion, most likely.  Keep a small detachment near the gate, and send the rest to guard the south.”

            There was a pause. “ _Uh, sir?_ ”

            “Yes?”

            “ _It’s, uh, just one person, sir._ ”

            “…an interesting diversion.  Perhaps they think they are still just dealing with extremists.”

            “ _He’s…shouting profanities at us in Ukrainian._ ”

            Oh, fuck _._   It wasn’t a diversion at all.  What was Grim thinking, letting Andriy anywhere near this situation?  This was going to turn ugly fast.

            “As I said, keep a small detachment and move the rest of our forces to the south end of the compound.”

            Pause. “ _Yes, sir._ ” 

            “Now where were we?”  Sam was wondering if he would be able to break the chains if he tried extra hard. Of course, even if he could, he was armorless and weaponless.  “Your friends are more creative than I gave them credit for, by the way. Or perhaps just stupid, but either way, no?”

            The sound of the walkie-talkie again.  “ _Sir, he’s made it into the compound interior._ ”

            Rusya made an annoyed clucking noise.  “Perhaps I did not make myself clear. When I said to leave a small detachment at the gate, I did intend for them to shoot him.”

            “ _We’re trying to, sir. So far, it has had little effect_.”

            Sam spared a moment to sympathize with the harried-sounding soldier. He sounded quite competent, and there was no way he was being paid enough to deal with Andriy Kobin on what was likely a drug-fueled rampage.

            “If you are _truly_ incapable of handling this yourself, you can divert part of the force from the south compound, but not too much of it.”

            “ _Thank you, sir_.” Sam marveled at the faint sarcasm in his voice.  Not enough to get him in trouble, just enough to relieve his obvious frustration. The walkie-talkie crackled again, but this time the only noise on the other end was gunfire, followed by a hoarse scream.  Sam didn’t think that was the voice of the soldier who had been speaking a moment ago. He was almost certain he recognized that particular inflection.

            Rusya swore.  “Bashkin, report!” he snapped.  No response. “Bashkin!”

            Sam almost chuckled despite his worry.  Admittedly, if you had a plan, and Andriy Kobin got involved, the plan would not persist in its original form for very long.  Kobin was very good at disrupting expectations.

            Rusya bellowed for the guards.  “We have to move,” he said shortly.  “Better to be with the rest of the force.  Get him up.”

            Sam heard the footsteps on the concrete again, felt the barrel of a weapon pressed against the back of his neck, as someone else hurriedly undid most of the chains and removed the bag from his head.  “Move,” someone snapped in heavily-accented English, and Sam rose, squinting his eyes to allow them to adjust.  He was in a small room with a concrete floor and a high, barred window. 

            The guards prodded him out of the room with their weapons, his captor panting and hurrying alongside.  He was a broad, sturdily-built man, with florid cheeks and a wheeze that had probably developed from years of smoking.  In spite of that, he clearly commanded respect.  The body language of the few guards they passed remaining in the hallway told Sam that.  One more piece of evidence that, despite his unassuming appearance, this ‘Rusya’ was good at what he did. 

            They went from the interior corridor into a wide, dusty courtyard surrounded on all sides by high walls with barbed wire on the top.  Too high for Sam to tell if the walls separated them from the exterior, or only from more compound.  Out here, the sounds of gunfire were closer, magnified by the concrete walls and traveling through the open air.  At least one person was firing an AK, and probably more than one—Sam caught the distinctive loud explosion followed by the softer clack, which he had been told sounded like a loud typewriter hit.  Not that he’d ever had occasion to use a typewriter, but it was just one of those things people said.  There was another weapon being fired as well—something a little quieter than the Kalashnikov.  Not as distinctive, but he was fairly sure that he recognized the sound as an HK416, because he knew that Paladin had several in their weapons locker, and he’d seen Andriy’s face when they looked in.

            There was another rapid stutter of gunfire, and then the sound of a small explosion—grenade. Probably a breach grenade, most likely Kobin blowing open one of the doors.  At least that meant he hadn’t gotten himself killed yet, Sam thought.

            They had made it halfway across the compound when another explosion hit, much closer this time.  It was not a large compound, as compounds went, and it wasn’t totally inconceivable that someone could move through it quickly, if, for a purely hypothetical example, most of the guards had been posted to the other side in anticipation of a second attack.  Rusya glanced to the side, then spat something rapidly into his walkie-talkie, too fast for Sam to follow.  It took him a moment to realize the man was speaking Ukrainian now, instead of Russian.

            He had barely finished speaking when a large chunk of the interior wall exploded inwards in a roughly circular shape.  Sam instinctively stiffened, glancing around the empty courtyard for places to take cover, but there were none.  Rusya and his two guards must have realized it as well, because one of them shifted his body in front of Rusya, and the other shoved Sam forward in front of him, the barrel of his gun still resting lightly on the back of Sam’s neck.  Too lightly. 

            Sam let the shove propel him forward, one knee sinking towards the ground as if he’d lost his balance.  The guard snapped something and reached for his elbow, shifting the weapon in his hands as he did so, which was all the opening Sam needed.  He ducked beneath the barrel and turned, yanking the gun from the surprised guard’s hand, before kicking him hard in the groin, as the easiest available target.  The guard doubled over.

            When Sam looked up, Kobin was ducking through the smoking remnants of the wall, raising his HK.  It spat a single bullet, then jammed.  Just how continuously had he been firing that thing?  With barely a glance down, even as the other guard and Rusya opened fire on him, Kobin casually freed the casing from the side with his gloved hand—much to Sam’s indignation—raised the gun and opened fire once again.  The guard went down. Rusya blanched and continued to fire, but Kobin didn’t even bother to dive for cover, just walking straight across the yard with a widening, predatory grin on his face.

            If it was enough to disquiet Sam, it was definitely enough to spook his captor. Rusya babbled something in rapid Ukrainian and continued to fire.  One of the shots hit—Andriy was knocked back in a cloud of dust and splinters—and then Sam brought the weapon he’d freed from the living guard down heavily on the back of Rusya’s head.  The man crumpled to his knees, dropping his gun.

            “What a great fuckin’ day for a reunion!” Kobin said, still wearing his manic grin as he strolled across the yard. 

            The grin was still worrying Sam.  He put up a hand.  “Don’t shoot him,” he said warningly.  “We need to interrogate him.”

            Rusya was making soft, whimpering noises and pulling himself into a sitting position.  “Ah, fuck,” he said, then squinted.  “Kobin? Christ, what are _you_ doing here?”

            Kobin ignored him, though Sam was somehow unsurprised that the two knew one another.  Surely out there somewhere there existed a seedy Eastern European criminal kingpin that Kobin did _not_ know, but they seemed to be exceedingly thin on the ground.  “Okay,” he said to Sam cheerfully. 

            “All right,” said Sam.  “Kobin, I need your phone so I can call Grim.”

            “Phone?”

            “Really?”

            “Look, I didn’t want to listen to her objections, okay?”

            Sam sighed, then turned to their new prisoner.  “Order your men to stand down,” he said. “Do you have a communications array of some kind?”

            “Yeah, yeah,” muttered Rusya, clearly both embarrassed and angry at this point. “Look, fucker, you won’t get far, I own this place and—”

            The explosion nearly deafened Sam, and he was actually vaguely impressed at how quickly Kobin had drawn his five-seven and fired.  Rusya screamed in pain, clutching at his leg. Sam glared at Andriy. “What the fuck did I just say?”

            Kobin grinned, displaying his teeth in that vaguely manic smile that he’d displayed before.  Not only was it unsettling—and arousing, noted a vague, adrenaline-high corner of Sam’s mind that he steadfastly ignored—it also drew some concern from Sam. Kobin’s pupils were constricted to pinpricks, and his face was marked with dust, grime, and blood. “Well,” he shrugged. “I didn’t shoot him _much_.”

            “Jesus Christ,” Sam said levelly.  “How much cocaine did you put into your system?”

            “A not unreasonable amount,” Kobin said evasively, which probably meant ‘enough to kill an elephant’.

            Rusya’s walkie-talkie crackled again.  “Sir, we’ve captured one of the infiltrators.  Orders?”

            The man’s eyes flicked from Sam to Kobin, then down to his shattered knee. “Stand down,” he gritted out. “Let him go.”

            There was a pause.  “Sir?”

            Again that flicker, as if Rusya were calculating something, but before he could speak again, Kobin stepped forward and roughly shoved the still-smoking barrel of the gun into the entrance wound.  Sam’s captor squealed, a high, long-drawn out sound like an animal in pain. “For _fuck’s_ sake, let him go,” he sobbed. 

            Pause. The dead silence of the man on the other end parsing that his leader was no longer in control of the situation. Sam waited patiently, aware this was a delicate situation.  Their eyes on the ground were unreliable, so he didn’t know what the likely reaction would be.  They might try to take command of the situation themselves.

            “Copy,” said the voice on the other end of the radio.  Sam’s body relaxed ever-so-slightly, and then Kobin was on him, one hand on the back of his neck, drawing him into a sudden, heated kiss. It only lasted a moment, but it was long enough.  It felt like years since Andriy had been in his arms, and the wild, barely-contained tension moving in the muscles beneath his hands was some kind of sudden miracle.

            His hands tightened around Kobin’s back, and the other man hissed in pain and pulled away.  “Ah, goddammit.”

            Sam had felt the shifting plates of the body armor beneath Kobin’s shirt. “You couldn’t have taken something a little more—well-tested?” he asked.

            “What? It’s dragon skin. What’s wrong with dragon skin?” Andriy sounded wounded.  He held one arm into his chest, protectively across his ribs.

            “It’s not certified, and it’s known to fail under high-temperature conditions. You should be wearing something—”

            “It’s light, and I’ve never had a problem before.”  Kobin shrugged, then made a pained whimper. “Fuck, I should _not_ have done that.”

            “Christ,” murmured Sam.  “We need to get you to medical.”  He turned back to the moaning Rusya.  “Where is your communications center?” he demanded.

            “Middle of the compound,” Rusya managed.  Sam squinted at his pale face.  Damn, they’d better tourniquet the leg before their newly-minted informant bled out.  He sighed.  Well, it looked like it was all logistics from here.

* * *

            “How is he?” Sam asked Dr. Nozumi.  After he had tourniqueted Rusya’s leg, he and Kobin had managed to get in contact with Grim from the base’s communication hub, and, with a newly-freed Briggs in tow, Grim’s extraction had resulted in the retrieval of all three of them, plus the wounded Ruslan Voronov.

            “Three cracked ribs, an incredible number of bruises, and a near-overdose of cocaine,” the doctor responded.  “Again. He’ll be fine. He’s already pestering me for morphine.”

            Sam raised an amused eyebrow.  “I take it you refused?”

            “I told him that anyone who could shake off the amount of propofol I gave him earlier probably wouldn’t see any marked improvement from the administration of morphine.”  Nozumi rolled his eyes.  “Fisher, your boyfriend is a mess.”

            The word gave Sam an odd, fluttering feeling in his stomach, and a vague portion of his mind noted it and filed it away for later investigation. “Yeah, he is.”

            “But we’re honestly all somewhat grateful to him,” Nozumi said, with a brief smile.  “I sent him back to his cabin after taping his ribs up.  You should go see him.  Don’t do anything too energetic, but if you don’t actually jar his ribs, you can feel free to enjoy yourselves.”

            Sam wasn’t going to touch that one with a bargepole.  “Thank you,” he said.  “And Briggs?”

            “Fine. Uninjured except for minor lacerations.  I think his pride is wounded, but it’ll heal.”

            “Tell him he did a good job,” Sam said.  “I’m going to go—check on Kobin.”

            “Mmm,” said Nozumi.  “I’ll be sure to pass on the message.”

* * *

            Sam found Kobin sprawled on his bunk, rifling through a number of small, plastic bags.  He jerked upright with a curse when Sam came in.

            “I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that,” Sam said mildly.

            “Fuck,” Kobin groaned, lying back.  “Our doctor is fucking evil.  Do you have any goddamn idea how much pain I’m in right now?”

            “Well,” said Sam, crossing to sit on the bed.  “Aren’t you the one who likes pain?”

            Kobin’s mouth opened in an indignant circle, but before he could speak, Sam reached out and gently started to undo the buttons of Kobin’s shirt, exposing his chest.  Nozumi had been right. Most of the visible part of Kobin’s chest was purple with bruising. 

            “Besides, some people might say that you brought this on yourself,” Sam pointed out, running a light hand across the mottled flesh.  Andriy shuddered and yelped.

            “Jesus, Fisher, you are cruel,” he muttered.  “What do you want, anyway?”

            Sam leaned forward and kissed him.  “I guess it’s not my fault if this hurts,” he said softly, languidly kissing his way down Andriy’s throat and collar-bone.

            “Ah, Christ,” moaned Kobin.  “Jesus fuck, Sam.  Not fair.”

            “No, don’t move,” Sam said lazily.  “Don’t want the kind doctor to have to set your ribs again.”

            Kobin whined as Sam’s lips traced his bruises, his breathing tightening into little panting spurts.  One hand reached up to fist in Sam’s hair.  “Shit,” he said exhaustedly.  “God, that’s good.” 

            “What the fuck were you thinking?” Sam demanded as he reached Kobin’s stomach. “Why didn’t you let Briggs handle it? You can’t put our missions in jeopardy like that.”

            “Don’t stop,” begged Kobin, and Sam paused with his hands on the clasp of the other man’s belt.  “Oh, come on, man.  Fuck.” Andriy squinted up at him, breathing heavily, sweat standing out on his face already, and Sam wasn’t sure if it was pain or arousal he was displaying.  Probably both.  “Because Grim wasn’t gonna listen to me.  If you don’t treat me like part of the team, I am not gonna act like it.”

            That was significantly more sense than Sam had been expecting to get out of him, and he paused for real this time.  “What do you mean?” he asked slowly.

            “Fuck, Sam, please,” moaned Andriy.  “Goddammit, fine.” He rolled up on one elbow with another hiss of pain.  “I mean that it never occurred to Grim to ask me for my info on Rusya.  Yeah, okay, I was worried, but there’s a reason I did what I did.  He was gonna be ready for anything else.  I grew up with that asshole, okay?  I know him.”

            “I’ll say something to Grim,” Sam said.  “I can’t promise anything.  You have a tendency to—overreact.”

            “No shit, man.  Are you saying you wouldn’t overreact if you thought I was—” Kobin halted, and Sam took the opportunity to undo his jeans.  Digging in his pocket, he produced a condom.

            “What I am saying,” Sam said steadily, as he rolled the condom down Andriy’s length, “is that I would not storm a solidly-fortified base _on my own_ without backup.”

            “Really? ’Cause I seem to remember you doing—hngh—what you just said when you were worried about Sarah.”

            Sam paused, and Kobin wriggled.  “Gnnn, Sam, please.”

            “You don’t have any training in stealth,” Sam pointed out.  “And you didn’t bother to try.  You literally walked into a heavily-armed compound with a machine gun and started shooting.”

            “Yeah, yeah, it was in-fucking-credibly stupid.  I am aware.  Rusya is good at expecting things, okay?”

            “Are you telling me—”  Sam slid a hand around Andriy’s cock, and the other man moaned loudly, arching his back and bucking.  “—that you would have done any differently under other circumstances?”

            “I—I might have,” gasped Andriy.  “Agh.  Oh god. Oh fuck.  Anyway, I was wearing body armor.”

            “And what if they’d shot you in the head?”

            “Well, then I’d be very fuckin’ dead, now wouldn’t I?”

            Sam dipped his head and closed his lips around Kobin’s cock, which resulted in a jerk and a pained noise.  The taste of the latex was bitter in his mouth, but Andriy’s heat beneath it was—some kind of heaven.  As he lathed his tongue along the shaft, he extracted another cry from Kobin. “Fucking—fucking hell, Sam—god, that hurts—” His almost sounded as if he were weeping, and Sam looked up in slight concern.  “Don’t stop—don’t _stop_ ,” Andriy begged, and a shaking hand fell onto Sam’s head.

            Sam turned his head and kissed Andriy’s palm, realizing as he did so the tips of the fingers were swollen and red.  He sighed.  “You know, there are better ways of dislodging a stove pipe jam than just dragging the fucking casing out.”

            “You think I don’t fucking know that?  Jesus, Fisher, I know how to work a fucking gun.”

            “Could have fooled me,” Sam muttered, but he traced a hand down Kobin’s side again, feeling the breath in Kobin’s lungs, the swollen welts where the bullets had struck and only been turned away by the unreliable, shifting scales of the dragon skin.  It was unbelievable that Kobin was still alive, but there was blood pumping through those veins, there was a living man writhing desperately beneath him, bucking into empty air. Sam took pity on him and closed his mouth around the erection in front of him again.

            Kobin gasped roughly, the hand falling back onto Sam’s head, clutching fiercely at his hair.  “Ah—yeah, like that, just like that, keep doing that, please god, please, Sam, I can’t, I fuckin’ can’t…”  Sam’s own hands fell onto Andriy’s hips as he continued to bob his head up and down. After a moment or two, he could no longer manage to hide his own arousal, and he used his right hand to unbutton his own trousers and grasp himself.  He grunted around Kobin’s cock at the feeling, and the other man looked up.

            “Oh, no fair,” he said breathlessly.  “Don’t I get to touch you?”

            Sam grinned awkwardly at him, not wanting to pull back in case the entire arrangement collapsed, and then went back to what he had been doing. Kobin’s hand tightened in his hair.  “C’mon, Sam,” he moaned.  “You can fuck me, don’t you wanna fuck me?”

            Sam really did pause at that, and Kobin squirmed and moaned again. “Love to,” Sam said. “But unfortunately you have three broken ribs, and I’m not sending you back to medical.”

            Kobin pulled a pitiful face.  “Fuck, Sam, I can’t wait till my _ribs_ heal for you to put your cock in me!”

            Sam took pity on him.  “We’ll see,” he said.  “But definitely not until you’re at least a little more healed up.”  Kobin groaned.  “Now stop complaining and let me do this.”

            “Okay, okay.”  Kobin let him duck his head and go back to what he had been doing.  Sam just wanted to taste all of it—to feel all of it—he wanted to kiss every bruise, every mark, every pucker and hollow of Andriy’s body.

            There was such power in his position right now, with Kobin laid out open and naked in front of him.  Experimentally, feeling slightly guilty, Sam scraped his teeth lightly down the edge of Kobin’s erection.  The response was a howl and Kobin’s hand tightening in his hair.  “ _Fuck_ yes,” came from further up the bed.  As the nails scraped through Sam’s hair, his hand tightened involuntarily around himself, because in a moment of strange clarity, he understood the pain.  The pain bound him to this moment and, in this moment, to Kobin.  Alive, both of them. For now, and maybe that was enough. He dragged his nails down the inside of Kobin’s thigh—“Ah, fuck, Jesus Christ, yeah, Sam, yeah— _fuck_ ”—and the words, coupled with the continuous tingling pain of Kobin’s hand clutching at his hair, were enough to drive him over the edge.

            He held onto Kobin’s thigh as he climaxed, anchoring himself in the middle of the rush of sensation that threatened to steal his senses. The moment after it passed, he slumped slightly, which had the effect of driving Kobin’s cock further up his mouth at a funny angle.  He pulled back to catch his breath.

            Andriy groaned in disappointment.  “Please, Sam,” he begged, voice hoarse with lust. Sam stared at him, straining upward, the parts of his body that were visible beneath the white bandages purple with bruising. 

            “Goddammit, Andriy,” Sam said softly.  “Lie down.”  He bent forward, drawn by an invisible magnet, and began, once again, to kiss everything he could find, starting with the notch of Kobin’s collarbone.  Kobin took a long, shuddering breath, his hand not moving away from Sam’s hair. 

            “Fuck,” he groaned, as Sam kissed along the trail of fine, dark hairs at the base of his stomach.  Sam smiled to himself and veered away along the line of his waistband, and Kobin made a miserable, desperate noise.  “Sam, fuck, you’re evil, you’re so goddamn evil, please, _please_.”  He tried to buck upward, and Sam held him in place.

            “Don’t, you’ll hurt your ribs.”

            “I don’t fuckin’ care, Sam, I need this, I need you, please, _shit_.”

            Andriy Kobin begging.  God, this was a hell of a drug.  Some vague portion of Sam’s mind told him to be careful.  He considered this, briefly, and then brushed it aside entirely. There were times to be cautious. This was not one of them.

            Kobin was whining again, but the sound transformed into something more akin to a hum as Sam once more took Kobin’s dick into his mouth.  He wanted more time to explore it, but he could feel the straining tension already drifting up Kobin’s abdominals, and he knew that he was—“I am so fucking close, oh my _fucking_ god, please, Sam—”

            Sam sucked hard, drawing his lips along the length of the shaft, and Kobin spasmed and climaxed with a shout, back arcing up off the bed no matter how Sam tried to hold him still.  They stayed like that for a moment, Andriy bent over Sam’s head, hand still pressing down, a full-body shudder running through him.  Then he toppled backward with a groan and a yelp of pain as he hit the bed.  Sam gave him a steady look. “That was stupid,” he said mildly, as he began to slide the condom off.

            “Don’t care,” muttered Kobin.  “Come over here.”

            “Just a sec.”  He tied off the condom and dropped it in the trashcan, then glanced around the room. An open packet of tissues lay across a stack of dog-eared magazines, and he used several to clean himself up before heading back over to the bed.  The narrow cot wasn’t really large enough for two people, but Kobin scooted to the side against the wall, and patted the bed beside him. 

            Sam lay down in the space that Kobin had made for him, and immediately, the other man curled against him.  “That was good,” he murmured sleepily.  “God, everything hurts, though.”

            Sam grunted noncommittally in reply, but put an arm around Kobin. In the wake of ebbing mission adrenalin and the heat of arousal, everything felt very slow and soft. The rough breathing of the man lying beside him eased as they lay without moving, and Sam found himself surprised, in a distant sort of way, that Andriy wasn’t trying to talk. As the commander, there was probably something he should be doing right now, but he couldn’t bring anything to mind.  There was nothing in his head but Kobin’s warmth at his side and the world that had narrowed to just the two of them.  In a moment, there wasn’t even that.

* * *

            _“How the fuck did you pull that off, Kobin?”_

_Even though they had left the room, he could still hear the high, buzzing whine of the fluorescent lights._

_“I’m fucking magic, man,” he grinned at Alexsiy, waving the wad of cash in his face.  The buzz wasn’t just in his ears now, it was also in his blood, fizzing and dancing as the cocaine won._

_“Seriously. Rusya was on fucking fire. How did you get him to go all in against a hand like that?”_

_The stars above were shining down a blessing on him—or at least, they probably were, he couldn’t see jack shit because of the smog.  He brought the money to his mouth, kissed it, tucked it into the inner pocket of his jacket.  It seemed to rustle smugly as he replied. “Didn’t look at my hand.”_

_“What.”_

_“I did not look at my hand.”_

_“Why.  Why wouldn’t you look at your cards?  For what possible reason?”_

_“He wanted to read my fucking tells?  Too fucking bad.”_

_Before his friend could say another word, the manic energy (was that the cocaine? Maybe it was just pure euphoria) caught at his legs, sent him racing and spinning down the street. Tomorrow, there might be consequences.  Tonight, there was only laughter and money and the hard stars beating down from somewhere invisible._

_* * *_

Kobin woke in agony. Every breath hurt, as his injured ribs shifted uncomfortably.  Maybe he’d just lie here without moving.  He was definitely on a downer right now, bloodstream clean of anything that might’ve been in there earlier, and he felt limp and worn out. The odd thing was that he didn’t feel the usual grey emptiness that hovered over him in the wake of a high. Just a calm laziness, his head pillowed against Sam’s arm.  God, that was still strange to him—being in bed with Sam Fisher, fuck, what even _was_ his life?

            Sam’s pocket vibrated, but the other man was dead asleep and didn’t stir. Yawning, Kobin dug the phone out and checked the caller, then put it to his ear.  “Hey, Grim,” he said lazily.  “Sammy’s sleeping.  Can I take a message?”

            There was a pause.  “Kobin. I owe you an apology.”

            He blinked at the phone.  “Uh. Fuck.  Who are you and what did you do with the Ice Queen?”

            “Don’t push your luck, Kobin.  I am apologizing because I should not have had you sedated.”

            He didn’t really know how to process this, so he didn’t bother. “’Kay,” he mumbled. “Anything else you need?”

            Pause. “It can wait until Sam is awake. And Kobin?”

            “Mm?”

            “Thank you for saving him.”  Before he could respond, she continued, “And if you _ever_ disobey my orders like that again, I will have you dropped from the plane without a parachute.”

            Kobin chuckled.  That was more what he’d been expecting.  “Sure, yeah. I’ll tell Sam you called. And I’ll start carrying around a chute.”  He ended the call halfway into her explosive noise of indignation, then lay back down.

            She’d sounded concerned.  Maybe he really was part of the team.  It was surprising how warm that thought made him feel.  He snuggled back against Sam’s sleeping form and yawned.  Okay, so he was in too much pain to sleep or move, and his access to anything remotely painkilling was blocked by Sam’s large form.  He was still a member of Fourth Echelon.  And he was absurdly, stupidly happy.

**Author's Note:**

> It wasn't poker, it was Coup, but the idea for Andriy's Incredibly Stupid (TM) idea for beating Rusya at poker is drawn from real life. My husband really did win a game by not looking at his hand. We were all...both flabbergasted and irritated, but it was beautiful, and it made its way into this. My husband DOES have more sense overall than Andriy Kobin, but that's not really a high bar, when you think about it.


End file.
